Isolation
by Shieldage
Summary: This time through, the Halloween spell has trapped the gang within some very personal hallucinations. Woe to the world around them.


BtVS by Whedon and M.E.

Slightly inspired by Terry Brooks' _The Tangle Box _and, much more directly, the Marauders of _World of Darkness_

* * *

Xander froze in place as the world shifted around him. Where there had been suburbia at night, there were now mountainous scrublands, the hot sun beating down on his face. He hefted the gun in his hands, which had acquired real weight, and checked his pockets to find them filled with odds and ends and army issued paper script.

_Shit,_ he thought as he looked around, spying some brownish-green canvas tents in the distance. _I hope this is M*A*S*H. I don't want to be in the Vietnam War... That was all _jungle, _right?_

Spotting a soldier nearby, red hair peeking out from under his helmet, Xander called to him. "Hey, odd question, but do you know where we are?" At his words, the man started to cross the rough dirt road apparently oblivious to the massive green truck bearing down on him. "Hey! Hey! Watch out!"

At the last second, the helmeted man turned and dove to the ground. The truck rumbled over him, its body high enough and its tires wide enough that was he spared from all but a short and sharp hail of fast moving dirt and small stones.

Xander ran over to the prone soldier as the truck continued on it's merry way. "Hey, are you alright? That was way too close."

"I don't know you," the soldier muttered, face down in the dirt.

Xander reached for him, to help him up, but the soldier rolled over to reveal a gun clenched in his hand. "Get away from me," the soldier yelled in a tone of pure panic as the gun went off.

"Fuck!" Xander fell back in the dirt, clutching the bleeding stumps of what had been two of the fingers on his right hand.

Xander panted in shock as the soldier struggled to his feet and ran off. With an effort of will, Xander stood up and staggered to the side of the road, where he propped himself up against the slope.

Hearing a rustling sound, Xander looked up to see a man with a blonde mustache and a large medical bag carefully picking his way down the hillside to him.

* * *

Willow smiled at the nice, grandmotherly woman who had opened the door for the Trick-or-Treaters and then blinked in surprise when the child dressed as a demon who had been at the front of the pack screamed in pure horror and ran off.

The two adults present looked around as most of the children Willow had been leading either scattered in panic or curled up in balls. One of them even fell to the ground and started to 'swim' through the grass. Willow turned and met the wide eyes of the old woman which abruptly widened even further as her face settled into a mask of horror.

As Willow opened her mouth to speak, she heard a loud thump and looked down to see her _own_ sheet covered body. Looking up again, she saw a closed front door accompanied by the sound of the woman locking it in haste.

After taking a few swipes at her own fallen body with the intent of somehow climbing back in there, Willow half-heartedly tried to knock at the door which confirmed that, yes, her body was passing through solid matter without resistance.

Screaming in frustration, she tore the copy of the sheet her ghostly body was still wearing off of herself, threw it to the ground and stomped on it. A wave of her hand through the porch railing confirmed that her problem didn't have so easy a fix.

After a bit of deep breathing, she calmed down a fraction. "I don't want to be a ghost," she muttered to herself. "I know! Giles can fix this."

Willow marched off with resolve, only to be distracted by the sound of Xander calling to her.

She started across the street to him, only to flinch as a moving car phased directly through her. She stood there a few seconds, then started moving again as he stopped running and skidded to halt a few feet away from her.

"That... That didn't happen, did it?" He slowly reached out to her.

"It's okay," she said, reaching out and gently waving so their hands intersected briefly. "It's a spell. A Halloween spell. I should stop being a ghost when it wears off."

A look of pure fear crossed his face at her 'touch', followed by his face contorting in rage. "Fuck off. You can't fool me. You're not Willow at all."

He spat on the ground at her feet and stormed off, looking warily back every few steps to make sure she wasn't following on her silent ghostly feet.

Willow stood there in shock as Xander ascended the curb and leaned against a mailbox to watch her better. Buffy came around the corner and, after taking a shortcut across the grass, draped one of her arms around Xander's back to comfort him with lowered words that Willow desperately pretended she couldn't hear.

"It's okay," Willow loudly said, a bit of pain underlying her words. "I know you're not actually this afraid of me for no reason. It's the costumes you're wearing that are affecting your brains, like they did to the kids! I'm going to ask someone hiding in one of these houses who's still themselves to call Giles so I can speak to him. There's no way he dressed up, right?"

* * *

Cordelia, dressed in the cat costume she'd purchased at Party Town, was driving to her party when she had to swerve to avoid a brightly lit girl in a bumblebee costume that had jumped out in the street ahead of her.

"What the Hell?" Cordelia eased down on the brakes as her eyes flicked to her rearview mirror, which confirmed that the girl she'd managed to avoid had started to run in circles in the middle of the street, a shimmering golden radiance pouring from her costume and her skin.

Looking back to the road in front of her, Cordelia slammed fully on the brakes when she saw someone taller outlined in the glare of her headlights.

She subconsciously winced as her car made contact but, instead of a dull thump, the right side of her car vaporized leaving _Willow_, of all people, standing where her passenger seat had been a second ago.

Shakily, Cordelia shifted the car into park and removed her keys from the ignition. She wasn't sure if she really needed to, considering half her engine was _gone_, but she had the vague idea that doing so would somehow keep her car from exploding...

"What the Hell?" Cordelia stormed out of her car, voice raising and lowering randomly with her stress. "If you'd been further into the road, you'd have taken my arm off. You can't do that. What the fuck are you doing? What the fuck are you? Can you hear me?"

Xander's voice broke Cordelia out of her shocked rant. She looked up to see him reaching out towards Willow.

Cordelia started to reach out to push him back, saw the glow of his skin and pulled her hand back as if she'd been burned. "I wouldn't do that if I were you."

Her warning fell on deaf ears as Willow reached out as well, the radiance streaming outward from the redhead's skin cutting cleanly through Xander's middle and index fingers.

"Oh, God." Cordelia's stomach flipped as Xander fell to the ground, swearing. She stared at the pair for a few seconds.

Xander, dressed in soldier's gear, was outlined in a faint green light that stopped less than an inch away from his skin.

Willow's aura was an ice blue and so dense that in some points Cordelia had some trouble seeing her clothes through it. While the vast mass of it reached no further than Xander's, thin tendrils of light would extend in fractal patterns feet above her head as if she was electrifying the air around her.

As Xander shakily pulled himself to his feet, Cordelia ran for the opposite curb, not wanting either of them to wander through her.

Breathing heavily, she turned to see Xander collapse against a mailbox.

A pink blur emerged from the darkness behind Xander, quickly resolving itself into Buffy Summers, who was wearing a princess dress that matched the color streaming from her skin. Kneeling down next to Xander, she ripped a length of cloth from her dress and moved to bind his wounds.

As Willow started to whine about how she couldn't understand why people were afraid of her, Cordelia called out: "Wait! Stop!"

Cordelia's voice trailed off as she realized that Buffy and Xander were making contact with neither of them hurting each other. _Oh,_ she thought. _That's right. He didn't erase the mailbox either. Hopefully it's only Willow that's destroying stuff. So my swerving to avoid the bumblebee was really, really a good thing. Wait- _"Willow!"

Cordelia spun around twice in search of Willow. The second turn through she spotted a Willow-shaped hole the redhead had left in someone's wall. "Great. I have to stop her from hurting people until she comes to her senses and she can't even see me!"

Buffy's head perked up at her words. "You're going after him? Listen, I may not look like a fighter in this dress, but, trust me. You can use my help."

"Great, she can hear me. Not the most appropriate words, but they're at least slightly reassuring." Cordelia briskly walked across the street to them after – very firmly – looking both ways. She shrugged as Xander's eyes fixed on her. "He can see me now too. Good. I can work with this. Maybe..."


End file.
